Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Blender, the free open source 3d content creation suite has come a long long way, and has proven to be a Hollywood class toolkit with some amazing showcase movies.

The opens source movie, the Big Buck Bunny exhibits the outstanding capabilities of Blender and ofcourse the talent of the artists involved.

Blender lets you do anything and everything including,

Modelling

Rigging

Animation

UV Unwrapping

Rendering

Shading

Physics and Particles

Imaging and Compositing

Realtime 3D / Game Creation

and lot more.

There are some amazing tutorials, books and videos to get started.

Here is a one that I found can get you upto speed real quick, especially the powerful use of keyboard shortcuts and cominbation of mouse is shown in this video that takes us from a single box to a fully modelled human figure in about an hour.

You can view or download it at Tutsplus.com.

Compared to expensive tools such as 3DS Max, or Maya, Blender gives a huge advantage not only in terms of cost, but an amazingly productive interafce which is very intiutive once past the learning curve.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

This is an outstanding book of reference for the pop up paper engineer.

There are plenty of books, that talk about the materials, what pop ups is all about, a few design ideas, and which give a few different components that go into popups. Some deal with a project building step by step. These are similar to several books on learning to draw, paint etc., where a series of samples are given, and by doing them, one learns to do exactly that particular piece. These books were teaching 'How to draw cars', 'How to draw people', 'how to draw animals' etc.. where the focus was on the cars, and people and the animals.. The real need for a learner to master the subject and make it their own is to know the foundation. what is need is a 'How to draw'.Period.

Then there were special books created by teachers such as Glenn Vilppu, Kimon Nicholaides, Bruce McIntyre, who came along and presented the 'elements'. Once we master the elements of any subject, we are well equipped to 'creating' an endless variety.

This book, true to its title deals with the elements. Like the alphabets and words of a language, the book contains page after page of simple elements, increasing in complexity. There are plenty of different elements that are presented using parallel and angle folds.

Simple elements such as box, cones, cylinders, armature, tents etc. are presented, and explained in detail. The book presents the 'elements', and all we need is the creativity to go build what we want to, using these elements. This is the classical approach to understanding this subject. Very well made book.

Also, the book takes us into the realm of paper engineering, with wheels, cams, pull-tabs and such.

The highlight of the book is that, all the elements that are dealt with are demonstrated with a working sample pasted on the book, along with detailed descriptions. There are 44 elements that the authors deals with in this large format book. 32 focussing on pop ups, and the rest based on wheels and pull-tabs. The templates or 'dies' for all these templates are available for free download from the author's website, which would be an amazing add-on.

This would be an essential book in the po-up engineer workshop.

After purchasing half a dozen books, I was looking precisely for one of this kind, and am glad I found it.

This is an extract from my review at Amazon.com, You can find more of my reviews here.

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I am an Information Technology Consultant living in Chennai, curious and passionate about several things. My craving for knowing and understanding things has led me from one small thing to the other and eventually to the Ultimate truth. With the new world view, I keep enjoying learning new things at its own leisurely pace and share here my thoughts as I encounter the events.